In a solid-state image sensing apparatus which uses a CCD image sensing device, an image quality undesirably degrades because of a smear phenomenon which occurs when strong light enters, and a vertical stripe caused by a defective pixel as phenomena unique to the CCD image sensing device.
The image quality degradation by these causes depends on the characteristics of the CCD image sensing device. However, recently, the characteristics of the CCD image sensing device is difficult to be improved because of a reduction in unit pixel size and high sensitivity along with downsizing and a multi-pixel structure.
In order to suppress the image quality degradation by the above causes, for example, Japanese Patent Publication No. 3-35870 discloses a method of extracting a noise component from an output signal from an optical black pixel portion in a vertical direction of the solid-state image sensing device, storing the extracted noise component in a line memory, and subtracting the signal, which is read out from the line memory, from the signal in a continuous video period.
However, the multi-pixel solid-state image sensing apparatus used in a digital camera and the like often thins out lines in the vertical direction in order to improve a frame rate in an electronic viewfinder display or the like. As such thinning out, for example, a method disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-278609 has been known. In this method, for example, when thinning out the vertical lines to ⅕, the vertical transfer stage counts of odd- and even-numbered lines are different from each other. As a result, a noise component amount of the odd-numbered line is different from that of the even-numbered line. In such thinning out, the noise component cannot be sufficiently suppressed in the above prior art, thus posing a problem.
Also, when blooming occurs in a video signal from the optical black pixel portion in the vertical direction of the solid-state image sensing device because of the irradiation of the strong light, the noise component is erroneously detected, and excessively corrected.